These pseudo-Christian Bigots are just bursting out in puss filled pustules of hatred and bigotry. They are beside themselves in all their un-American glory at not being able to deny their fellow citizens their equal rights and dignity.

Antigay Group in Tizzy Over Two Grooms

Macy’s, the retailer who has been among the staunchest LGBT corporate supporters, is under attack again, this time by One Million Moms, a small antigay group billed as “a project of the with the American Family Association.” The problem? Two tiny grooms, barely visible, atop a wedding cake in an advertisement that was sent to homes last week. The ad, an enticement to join Macy’s gift registry, features a car with a trunk full of wedding and honeymoon paraphernalia, from that festooned wedding cake to vintage luggage.

It was apparently enough to rile the Moms, who wrote on their website, that instead of making sales, Macy’s had “offended many customers in the process. The back cover looks like just a regular advertisement for their wedding registry service, but there is one major difference. When you take a closer look you see the cake topper of two men instead of the traditional man and woman. The ad also includes a license plate that reads ‘I do’ and hearts scattered everywhere. Macy’s must believe this is mainstream, but just because gay marriage is legal in a few states, this is inappropriate marketing and conservative customers will not support it.”

Hate Group Pressuring J.C. Penney to Drop Ellen DeGeneres

American retail chain J.C. Penney announced last week that it will forge a new partnership with talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. Company president Michael Francis said, “We couldn’t think of a better partner to help us put the fun back into the retail experience.”

But One Million Moms, a project of the anti-gay American Family Association (designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center), is pressuring J.C. Penney to drop DeGeneres because the People’s Choice Award winner for Favorite Daytime TV Host “offends traditional families” and claims that the majority of the company’s customers “will no longer shop there.”

Minister Calls Pro-Equality Starbucks “Hater of God”

Claiming that Starbucks’ support of marriage equality means it “hates God,” ultraconservative minister Steven Andrew is calling on Christians to get their caffeine buzz elsewhere.

The Seattle-based coffee purveyor is among more than 100 companies that have pledged support for marriage equality in Washington State. The state Senate Wednesday approved a bill that would grant marriage rights to same-sex couples, and the House of Representatives is expected to follow suit soon.

In an online post published this week, Andrew, president of a California-based group called USA Christian Ministries, says all Christians and their churches should boycott Starbucks. “Christians are upset with Starbucks for turning against God, but we are glad to know that Starbucks doesn’t pretend to be for Christians,” he says in the post. He cites Bible verses that call homosexuality “an abomination” and those who oppose biblical tenets “haters of God.”

It’s probably the fastest-spreading story in Internet history about the relationship between two non-profits. Late Tuesday afternoon, Planned Parenthood and Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure announced that Komen would be withdrawing grants given to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings. Despite Komen’s lame attempts to claim otherwise, it was widely understood that this was about Komen aligning itself with the anti-choice movement, despite the anti-choice movement’s long history of opposing not just safe and legal abortion, but also access to contraception and even the prevention of cervical cancer through the use of the HPV vaccine.

So what gives? Why would Komen, which purports to be a women’s health organization, choose to align itself with an anti-health, anti-science movement instead of with another prominent women’s health organization that actually helps prevent and detect cancer? What role does Komen’s hearty corporate fundraising efforts play in all of this? Is there anything that people who care about women’s health concerns can do?

In the past couple of decades, one of the biggest accomplishments in women’s healthcare advocacy is destigmatizing breast cancer, and Komen certainly played a major role in this. In the past, women didn’t talk much about breast cancer, because like all things related to women’s sexuality, breasts were considered naughty and unspeakable and therefore so was breast cancer. Through cutesy methods, such as draping everything imaginable in pink ribbons, advocates were able to get breast cancer out of the closet and into the public discourse.

Unfortunately, in doing so, they weren’t quite able to lift the taboo on all of women’s healthcare. In place of the old taboo against all of women’s reproductive healthcare, there was now an above-the-belt/below-the-belt divide. When it comes to healthcare that allows women to keep their breasts, everyone from baseball players to every corporation looking to shore up its image was happy to talk about it. But anything below the belt, especially with regard to women managing their actual sex lives, remained taboo. STDs, pregnancy prevention, cervical cancer, abortion? All still considered dirty, and all still available for conservatives to demagogue about sin and sexuality. We are a country where everyone was clawing all over each other to talk about how important it is for women to get their boobs squeezed in a vise to look for cancer, but we’re also a country where a vaccine that’s been proven to prevent cancer below the belt is excoriated by prominent Republican politicians who want you to believe it gives “license” to female sexuality.

On the morning after the Florida primary, Mitt Romney bounded out of bed, inhaled the sweet air of victory, donned his new cloak of invulnerability …

… and went on CNN to announce that he doesn’t care about poor people.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor,” he told a slightly stunned-looking Soledad O’Brien.

Whenever the topic turns to wealth, or the lack thereof, some inner demon seems to make Romney say something that sounds ridiculous, offensive or ridiculously offensive.

If this had been post-South Carolina, we might have assumed that he was making a play for the segment of his party that believes the greatest threat to the American way of life is greedy paupers. But the nomination was in the bag! Mitt was just being Mitt and trying to present himself as the candidate of the middle class, which he defined as “the 90-95 percent of Americans who, right now, are struggling.” Subtract the 1 percent at the top and Romney appeared to be saying that he was absolutely not going to direct his campaign at the bottom 4 percent of the American public. That certainly makes sense politically, since you are talking — according to my very rough calculations — mostly about folks who are living in households with incomes under $5,000. Not a group with terrific turnout.

Let’s deconstruct his entire remarks:

I’m in this race because I care about … (tiniest of pauses)… Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. …

The woman on the platform seems happy. She’s an ordinary woman, well-dressed but not ostentatiously so, pretty but not playing it up, heading gracefully into late middle age. Her voice is low and calm; her tone is gracious. She smiles frequently as she speaks, compliments the reporters surrounding her and tells them how good it’s been to work with them, with what reads as genuine affection.

“I think after twenty years–and it will be twenty years–of being on the high wire of American politics, and all of the challenges that come with that,” she says, “It would probably be a good idea to just find out how tired I am.”

That gets a laugh, and she laughs with it. If you take Hillary Clinton moment by moment–if you take her, for example, at this moment on January 26, as she announces that she step down from her position as the Secretary of State when the president’s terms ends–it’s hard to imagine that she’s spent the last two decades of her life as one of the most hated women in America. And if you take her on the whole, the void left by her promised departure from American politics is nearly impossible to comprehend.

“Women look for themselves in any woman who stands out among a sea of men,” says blogger Melissa McEwan, of Shakesville. “Women who find themselves in Hillary Clinton have a passionate attachment to her, because they see reflected back at them qualities they have or hope to acquire–strength, independence, fortitude, a commitment to other women–but also because to see a woman with those qualities in her position is some sign, even despite her Shawshankian swim through a river of shit to get there, that this nation will embrace a woman like that, like them.”

For decades, Hillary Clinton has served as a litmus test for just how much the American public will accept from a smart, ambitious, assertive, feminist woman: How much she can reasonably hope to attain, and what opposition she will face. Her basic competence has never truly been in question; her “likability,” the ability of society to accept her, always has been. And women have projected their deepest hopes and fears onto her throughout.

WASHINGTON — In a speech expounding on the rift between rural America and Washington D.C., Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) vowed Thursday to use his funding powers to stop the Obama administration from implementing new child-labor rules pertaining to agricultural work, accusing the “urban” Labor Department of meddling in a “rural” industry it doesn’t understand.

“This is one of those situations where I think the Department of Labor is overstepping its boundaries, its knowledge base, and frankly I think you’re sitting around watching reruns of “Blazing Saddles” and that’s your interpretation of what goes on in the West,” Rehberg, who holds the Labor Department’s purse strings for the House of Representatives, said as he lectured a labor official during a hearing Thursday. “And it’s not anymore.”

Last year, the Labor Department proposed new rules governing what kinds of potentially dangerous tasks minors can and cannot perform on farms and in grain facilities. Although child and worker advocates said the new rules were long overdue, the proposals created an uproar among farmers and agricultural trade groups, who argued that the rules could hurt family-farming traditions.

Although the original proposals largely exempted family farms, the Labor Department bowed yesterday to the farming industry, further widening the exemptions it had already put forward. But that didn’t stop Rehberg and GOP members of the House agriculture subcommittee from piling on the department Thursday, using the hearing as an opportunity to put forth their rural bona fides.